Thesis (D. Min.)--Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 257-261)

abstract: Corporations in biomedicine hold significant power and influence, in both political and personal spheres. The decisions these companies make about ethics are critically important, as they help determine what products are developed, how they are developed, how they are promoted, and potentially even how they are regulated. In the last fifteen years, for-profit private companies have been assembling bioethics committees to help resolve dilemmas that require informed deliberation about ethical, legal, scientific, and economic considerations. Private sector bioethics committees represent an important innovation in the governance of emerging technologies, with corporations taking a lead role in deciding what is ethically appropriate or problematic. And yet, we know very little about these committees, including their structures, memberships, mandates, authority, and impact. Drawing on an extensive literature review and qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews with executives, scientists and board members, this dissertation provides an in-depth analysis of the Ethics and Public Policy Board at SmithKline Beecham, the Ethics Advisory Board at Advanced Cell Technology, and the Bioethics Committee at Eli Lilly and offers insights about how ideas of bioethics and governance are currently imagined and enacted within corporations. The SmithKline Beecham board was the first private sector bioethics committee; its mandate was to explore, in a comprehensive and balanced analysis, the ethics of macro trends in science and technology. The Advanced Cell Technology board was created to be like a watchdog for the company, to prevent them from making major errors. The Eli Lilly board is different than the others in that it is made up mostly of internal employees and does research ethics consultations within the company. These private sector bioethics committees evaluate and construct new boundaries between their private interests and the public values they claim to promote. Findings from this dissertation show that criticisms of private sector bioethics that focus narrowly on financial conflicts of interest and a lack of transparency obscure analysis of the ideas about governance (about expertise, credibility and authority) that emerge from these structures and hamper serious debate about the possible impacts of moving ethical deliberation from the public to the private sector. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Biology 2012

D.Comm. / Accurate, credible and reliable financial reporting is critical for the effective functioning of the world’s capital markets and the protection of the interests of stakeholders, who rely on such information for their decision making. All the well- known corporate collapses of the 21st century have in common fraudulent financial reporting, unscrupulous management practices and the fact that they all had audit committees consisting of well-known and respected people. This state of events highlighted the fact that audit committees should not merely exist as window-dressing, but should be effective in their functioning. Audit committees will thus only be of value if they are properly constituted, are functioning effectively and if their role is clearly understood by all the parties concerned. This study’s research problem was to analyse the effective functioning of audit committees in the modern business environment, and the study aimed to investigate the factors and events that impact on the development, status and effective functioning of audit committees at large listed companies in South Africa. This was done through a comprehensive literature study of the factors impacting on audit committees and the empirical testing thereof at the largest listed companies in South Africa. The study found that audit committees are well established, properly constituted, have the authority and resources to effectively discharge their responsibilities and consist of members who act independently and who have the right mix of appropriate experience, financial literacy and financial expertise amongst their members. The audit committee’s role was found to be generally well understood and supported by the board and the Chief Financial Officers. It was further found that the audit committees are effective in discharging their oversight responsibilities on the board’s behalf, with the only real exception being their effectiveness regarding IT-related aspects. However, audit committee reporting in annual reports was found to be of a poor standard and did not reflect the iii actual workings and effectiveness of the committee. It was also found that the audit committee’s perceived responsibilities are evolving and that audit committee members’ legal liabilities are increasing. The research findings make a valuable contribution to the existing body of knowledge on current audit committee practices and developments. The study also outlines new responsibilities for future audit committees, as well as aspects that should be addressed in future legislation, regulations, corporate governance codes and best practice standards for audit committees.

The purpose of this study was to determine the perceived effectiveness of specific advisory committee activities during a school bond proposal and election process. The study began with an extensive review of the literature on the use of advisory committee activities in school districts for the purpose of promoting a school bond issue. This revealed that school officials maintaining a low profile, the presence of a diverse community task force, focusing on YES voters, involving the committee in early planning, focusing on disseminating information, and focusing on benefits to children and the community are all important in the passage of a school bond election. A survey was developed and administered to committee members, school board members and school district administrators in a North Texas school district that had successfully completed a bond election. Survey respondents consistently supported the practices put into place by the studied school district, which closely mirrored the activities espoused in the research. Respondents believed the diversity of the task force and the roles of the committee members to be crucial to the passage of the bond. The only subcategory of questions that drew mixed reviews and positions of support was that of the need for the administration and board to maintain a low profile. Participants in the survey viewed having a diverse community task force, focusing on YES votes, involvement in early planning, focusing on disseminating information, and focusing on benefits to children and the community as being important to the successful passage of the school bond election, with clear dissemination of information being the most important activity of the committee.

In this thesis, we look into the problem of forming and maintaining good committees that can represent a distributed network. The solution to this problem can be used as a sub-routine for Byzantine Agreement that only costs sub-quadratic message complexity. Most importantly, we make no cryptographic assumptions such as the Random Oracle assumption and the existence of private channels. However, we do assume the network to be peer-to-peer, where a message receiver knows who the message sender is. Under the synchronous full information model, our solution is to utilize an approximating disperser for selecting a good next committee with high probability, repeatedly. We consider several existing theoretical constructions (randomized and deterministic) for approximating dispersers, and examine the practical applicability of them, while improving constants for some constructions. This algorithm is robust against a semi-adaptive adversary who can decide the set of nodes to corrupt periodically. Thus, a new committee should be selected before the current committee gets corrupted. We also prove some constructions that do not work practically for our scenario. / Graduate

The thesis analyzes the development and status of the Olympic Movement in the Visegrad countries and makes the mutual comparison of it in these countries. History of development of modern sport since its inception, including interest in the nascent Olympic Movement in these countries, has similar features. Especially after the onset of communism the Czech and Slovak Republics, Hungary and Poland, went, not only in sport, through similar developments. This area was "united" and its management has pursued state organization, which claimed to control all branches of sport. After the fall of the communist regime awaited new challenges for sport. Sport had to at least partially replace state funding for alternative sources, build it's own structures, set up relationships between subjects of sports scene, establish the place in these relations and structures of the Olympic Committee or influence the legislative framework for their own effect. During the research it became clear that understanding the development of sport and the Olympic Movement after the fall of communism is not possible without a thorough description of the situation in the region after the Second World War and the emergence of communist regimes in the countries of the future Visegrad Four. Therefore, the original intention, working primarily...

Audit committee members play a pivotal role in the audit process, specifically, when negotiating disputes between management and the external auditor concerning audit adjustments. According to Auditing Standard 16 (formerly AU Section 380.34-.44), the external auditors are required to discuss, with the audit committee, all significant findings resulting from the completion of the audit including: (i) qualitative aspects of estimates; (ii) uncorrected misstatements; and (iii) disagreements with management (PCAOB 2015). Prior literature suggests an audit committee’s propensity to support the external auditor when dealing with the issues described above (Knapp 1987; DeZoort and Salterio 2001; DeZoort et al. 2003b; DeZoort et al. 2003a). However, these studies do not address how behavioral factors such as a relationship between the external auditors and audit committee members can affect a member’s stance on a proposed audit adjustment. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect that the relationship between audit committee members and external auditors has on a member’s recommendation for proposed audit adjustments during a management dispute with the external auditor (i.e., whether they side with the external auditors or management). Specifically, this experiment examines the effects of relationships and the mediating effect of external auditor tenure on an audit committee member's judgments through the application of several social cognitive theories: (i) attachment theory; (ii) social judgment theory; (iii) and internal working models. Results indicate that external auditor/audit committee member relationships and auditor tenure significantly influence an audit committee member’s decision making when faced with an auditor/management dispute. Also, auditor tenure (long) does not negatively affect audit quality.

The thesis analyzes the development and status of the Olympic Movement in the Visegrad countries and makes the mutual comparison of it in these countries. History of development of modern sport since its inception, including interest in the nascent Olympic Movement in these countries, has similar features. Especially after the onset of communism the Czech and Slovak Republics, Hungary and Poland, went, not only in sport, through similar developments. This area was "united" and its management has pursued state organization, which claimed to control all branches of sport. After the fall of the communist regime awaited new challenges for sport. Sport had to at least partially replace state funding for alternative sources, build it's own structures, set up relationships between subjects of sports scene, establish the place in these relations and structures of the Olympic Committee or influence the legislative framework for their own effect. During the research it became clear that understanding the development of sport and the Olympic Movement after the fall of communism is not possible without a thorough description of the situation in the region after the Second World War and the emergence of communist regimes in the countries of the future Visegrad Four. Therefore, the original intention, working primarily...

This dissertation empirically expands the existing knowledge on participatory democracy through a study of Jamaica's Parish Development Committees (PDCs). These groups offer an avenue for Jamaicans to inform government policy, and this analysis explored the extent to which supportive institutional, infrastructural and superstructural (referring to the society's culture and power configurations) conditions for robust implementation of this democratization initiative existed. This inquiry involved observing more than one hundred hours of PDC activities at locations across Jamaica and conducting sixty key informant and four focus group interviews with relevant stakeholders. The analysis was bolstered by an appreciation of emancipatory politics employed by the country's general population since slavery not only to survive oppression, but also to influence the nation's political agenda. Riots during slavery and in the present day, for example, have offered citizens an avenue towards self-determination. This study found that the emergence, survival and thriving of PDCs in Jamaica is determined largely by the extent to which emancipatory political tactics are successfully applied by PDC stakeholders to combat a number of continuing challenges in these committee's environments. The democratization initiative symbolized by the PDCs promotes inclusiveness yet is led predominantly by older, educated middle class individuals with talents and capacities garnered from several years of experience in various fields. The dissertation argues that the opportunity cost of a more inclusive order explains this fact, in that Jamaica's finite resources mean there is limited space for a learning curve and the cash strapped committees have only been able to survive when their members could help to defray the cost of their operations. The dissertation explores other central challenges confronting the PDCs and the strategies these participative organizations have employed to address each. Primarily, this analysis provides a micro-scale view of the interaction of the factors that have shaped the power and possibility of Jamaica's democratization initiative. / Ph. D.

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